Currently, delivery services, such as the United States Postal Service (USPS), provide mail delivery service to customers or “addressees”. The delivery services provide a wide range of delivery options, such as delivery to home addresses, delivery to business addresses, and delivery to mail boxes located at central offices such as post offices. For example, the United States Postal Service (USPS) has 16 million Post Office (PO) boxes rented to customers (“holders”). Typically, when mail pieces arrives at a post office, a delivery service worker merely “cases” the mail pieces (i.e. places the mail pieces in the appropriate mail box or prepares the mail pieces for delivery to other locations, such as a home and business addresses) without notifying the addressee. A mail piece may be any type of correspondence handled by a delivery service, such as letters, packages, flats, catalogs, postcards, etc. In this situation, the addressee is unaware of the contents of their mail box or mail pieces en route until they check their mail boxes at the post offices or the mail piece is delivered to their home or business. The conventional addressee must therefore manage their mail boxes physically and in person.
An addressee wastes time and transportation costs each time he or she makes a trip to the post office and finds that the mail box contains only standard, or low priority mail the holder would not have made a trip for, had he or she known the contents of the mail box. Many addressees do not want to go check their mail everyday; but instead only want to go when it contains something important, such as a check or other important documents. This is especially true if the addressee is not located conveniently near the post office because a lengthy trip involves much time, effort, and expense. In addition, unnecessary trips to the post office contribute to post office congestion. However, problems may occur when an addressee elects not to visit the post office to check their mail box, and the mail box contains an important time-sensitive mail piece, such as an overdue bill or a perishable item.
Likewise, an addressee has no method to determine what mail pieces are en route to their home or business address. An addressee may wish to know what type of mail pieces are en route to be delivered to locations, such as home and business mail boxes. This is especially true if the addressee is waiting to receive an important document, such as checks or perishable items. This may also cause problems for people who have mail pieces addressed to delivery addresses, such as a vacation home address, home address, or business address, during a period that they are away.
One proposed solution to some of the problems of mail management uses the PLANET Code™ of the USPS, which is an applied barcode that uniquely identifies mail pieces from certain mailers. The PLANET Code™ may be used to track a mail piece. That is, by submitting an inquiry, an addressee may track the current location of a PLANET-coded mail piece, and determine the mailer. This method requires that the addressee know each mailer to whom a PLANET Code™ is assigned. Another proposed PLANET Code™ solution, described in U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 60/239,926, entitled Flexible Parcel Delivery System and Method, inventors Edward J. Kuebert, Scott R. Bombaugh, and William J. Dowling, filed Oct. 13, 2000, uses the PLANET Code™ information to notify addressees that a mail piece is in transit.
However, to use this tracking capability, an addressee must know that the mail piece actually contains a PLANET Code™, as well as other information such as the PLANET Code™ number. In addition, only a limited number of large volume mailers use a PLANET Code™, so PLANET-code-based systems are limited to a small subset of all mail pieces. Thus, an addressee generally cannot determine what mail pieces are in his PO box or other delivery point; he can only find out about a limited subset of PLANET coded mail. Further, this method requires that, the delivery service somehow associate the PLANET Code™ with the mailer's name, address, and other notification information. This method involves centralized database lookups, and, as noted, only applies to a large volume mailers who are participating in the PLANET Code™ program.
Another proposed solution to some of the disadvantages of mail management is the “E-box Check” system of the USPS. E-box Check allows a user to go to a website and gain some information regarding mail pieces delivered at, or en route to, their mail box. The E-Box Check system is described further in U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 60/245,670, entitled Remote Mailbox Management System and Method, inventor Ronald Garey, filed Nov. 6, 2000.
However, E-box Check provides limited information about mail pieces; typically, the number of mail pieces and the mail class of each mail piece in a mail box. For a subset of mail pieces that have a PLANET Code™, E-box Check can also provide sender identification information. E-box Check requires adding equipment and/or human processing to the existing conventional delivery system. For example, either sensors (or other per-mailbox apparatuses) are needed to determine that a mail piece is in a mail box, or a postal worker must “wand” a mail tray to notify the E-box Check system that the mail has been cased.
Yet another proposed solution to some of the disadvantages of mail management is the USPS's Reply Card Notification (RCN) system. The RCN system supplies an image of the back of a reply postcard (e.g., a card to purchase compact discs from Columbia House Records Co.), to the addressee. In the RCN system, the cards are first sorted conventionally, which segregates all the cards for a specific addressee. Then, the cards are rerun backwards through the existing sorting machinery in order to capture an image of the information on the back. The image is supplied to the addressee.
However, in this method, it is difficult and inefficient to run the cards backwards through existing machinery. Putting cameras on both sides to solve this problem may also increase the cost of the system. Also, the RCN service may only be provided to a very few specific addressees—addressees who received a specific type of reply postcards containing information from customers. Further, the USPS may not provide assurance that images of all the cards had been provided. Due to the business nature of the information in the image, an extremely high readability rate, approaching 100 percent, may be required by the addressee.
Accordingly, a need exists for systems and methods that efficiently and cheaply provide an addressee with information about the mail pieces en route to, or already delivered to, the addressee's delivery point, particularly an addressee's mail box. A need exists for systems and methods that efficiently make use of existing, in-place postal handling equipment to provide the information to the addressee. Needed are systems and methods that supply information concerning a large percentage of the mail pieces handled by a delivery service, not merely a subset of mail pieces with certain delivery-service-applied codes.